Comments on the “Synthetic Cell”

"The now famous announcement by the Venter group is based on their paper in Science entitled Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome. We applaud this work for its impressive technical achievement and we acknowledge its future potential. However, we find the term “creation” to be misleading because the "new" cell was assembled using mainly preexisting constituents. We also find the term worrisome because, somewhat perversely, it may bring up creationism. We reprint a comment submitted by Bernie Strauss in response to the timely article published in Nature: Life After the Synthetic Cell. His words accurately express our sentiments."